Danny Boyle and Alex Garland Return to Direct & Write '28 YEARS LATER,' will launch new trilogy

by Darian Scalamoni

    Rumors began to swirl earlier this month that there may be a return on the horizon to the 28 Days/Months franchise, and now, we have confirmation that it's coming to fruition. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the follow-up will be titled 28 Years Later and will see Danny Boyle and Alex Garland collaborate to potentially forge a new trilogy of films.

    28 Days Later released in 2002 and saw Garland write the script for Boyle to direct. The zombie thriller also starred current Oscar frontrunner Cillian Murphy, long before his days of building an atomic bomb on the big screen. Later this week, the film package is expected to hit studios and streamers to buy as they aim for a $75 million budget, a tick up from the first film and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later. The report states that Boyle will direct the first film in the new turn for the franchise, while Garland would write the script for all three potential films. 

    Boyle and Garland have talked publicly for years about doing a potential sequel to their original film, speculating that it might be called 28 Months Later, having now settled on 28 Years Later. Murphy is currently not in talks to star, however, with the original team intact, it might be a matter of time. 28 Days had Murphy star as a man who awoke from a coma to find England was a desolate, zombie-riddled landscape. He begins to navigate it on his own before meeting a survivor played by Naomie Harris and an Army major played by Christopher Eccleston.

    The biggest thing that had come out of that movie though was that due to its profitability, it revitalized the zombie genre allowing for other projects such as The Walking Dead, Zombieland, World War Z and Dawn of the Dead to trickle in and follow-up. It also acted as a springboard for the writing/directing/acting trio that was Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and Cillian Murphy.

    Boyle followed up his success from 28 Days with films such as Sunshine, the Best Picture-winning Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours and Steve Jobs. Garland wrote Sunshine with Boyle before going off to write other screenplays including Never Let Me Go and Dredd. Garland then received the directing bug himself, turning around and creating inventive original sci-fi worlds across film and television with projects such as Ex Machina, Annihilation and the FX series, Devs. 

    Murphy went from scouring the empty London streets to getting the call from Christopher Nolan to be the first antagonist of Christian Bale's dark knight in Batman Begins. Since then, he's established himself with two iconic roles on the small and big screen. First, playing the main character of Tommy Shelby in the 1900s gangster epic television series, Peaky Blinders. He followed up that with his role as nuclear physicist/scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in this year's biographical drama, Oppenheimer in his sixth collaboration with Christopher Nolan, garnering remarkable buzz and awards in droves for his starring titular role.